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You can expect that Bill Gates's godson is going to get into Har- vard and have a fabulous job waiting for him when he gets out. And, of course, if you play poker with the Mayor and Al Friedman it is going to be a little easier to get ahead in Chicago. But how many godsons can Bill Gates have? And how many people can fit around a poker table? This is why affirmative action seems pointless to so many people: It appears to promise something-entry to the old-boy network-that it can't pos- sibly deliver. The old-boy network is al- ways going to be just for the old boys. Granovetter, by contrast, argues that what matters in getting ahead is not the quality of your relationships but the quantity-not how close you are to those you know but, paradoxically, how many people you know whom you aren't par- ticularly close to. What he's saying is that the key person at that breakfast in downtown Chicago is not the Mayor or Al Friedman but Lois Weisberg, be- cause Lois is the kind of person who it really is possible for most of us to kno If you think about the world in this way, the whole project of affirmative action suddenly starts to make a lot more sense. Minority-admissions pro- grams work not because they give black students access to the same superior ed- ucational resources as white students, or access to the same rich cultural envi- ronment as white students, or any other formal or grandiose vision of engi- neered equality. They work by giving black students access to the same white students as white students-by allow- ing them to make acquaintances out- side their own social world and so shortening the chain lengths between them and the best jobs. This idea should also change the way we think about helping the poor. When we're faced with an eighteen- year-old high-school dropout whose only career option is making five dollars and fifty cents an hour in front of the deep fryer at Burger King, we usually talk about the importance of rebuild- ing inner-city communities, attracting new jobs to depressed areas, and re- investing in neglected neighborhoods. We want to give that kid the option of another, better-paying job, right down the street. But does that really solve his problem? Surely what that eighteen- year-old really needs is not another mar- ginal inducement to stay in his neigh- THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 11, 1999 borbood but a way to get out of his neighborhood altogether. He needs a school system that provides him with the skills to compete for jobs with middle- class kids. He needs a mass-transit sys- tem to take him to the suburbs, where the real employment opportunities are. And, most of all, he needs to know some- one who knows someone who knows where all those good jobs are. If the world really is held together by people like Lois Weisberg, in other words, how poor you are can be defined quite sim- ply as how far you have to go to get to someone like her. Wendy Willrich and Helen Doria and all the countless other people in Lois's circle needed to make only one phone call. They are well-off: The dropout wouldn't even know where to start. That's why he's poor. Poverty is not deprivation. It is isolation. I ONCE met a man named Roger Hor- chow. If you ever go to Dallas and ask around about who is the kind of person who might know everyone, chances are you will be given his name. Roger is slender and composed. He talks slowly, with a slight Texas drawl. He has a kind of wry, ironic charm that is utterly winning. If you sat next to him on a plane ride across the Atlantic, he would start talking as the plane taxied to the runway, you would be laughing by the time the seat-belt sign was turned o and when you landed at the other end you'd wonder where the time had gone. I met Roger through his daugh- ter Sally, whose sister Lizzie went to high school in Dallas with my friend Sara M., whom I know because she used to work with Jacob Weisberg. (No Jacob, no Roger.) Roger spent at least part of his childhood in Ohio, which is where Lois's second husband, Bernie Weisberg, grew up, so I asked Roger if he knew Bernie. It would have been a little too apt if he did-that would have made it all something out of "The X-Files"-but instead of just answer- ing, "Sorry, I don't," which is what most of us would have done, he paused for a long time, as if to flip through the "W" s in his head, and then said, "No, but I'm sure if I made two phone calls. . ." Roger has a very good memory for names. One time, he says, someone was trying to talk him into investing his money in a business venture in Spain, and when he asked the names of the other investors he recognized one of